Journalist, Author & Detroit-Home Renovator

Detroit Hustle

May 2016

“The amazing charm of Detroit Hustle by Amy Haimerl is its brilliant use concurrent narratives – one quite personal, one about a down-on-its-luck city trying to get up off its knees – to show how perseverance, community and love are so essential to both stories. Each chapter has you rooting for the city, but also cheering for the writer and her husband, their neighbors and family, and the expansive house renovation project whose journey, hiccups and all, makes them into Detroiters.”

“Amy Haimerl is uncommonly honest and willing to tell just what it was like – and how much it cost – to restore her old house she and her husband purchased in Detroit. But most importantly she examines privilege, gentrification, naiveté, and the realities of ‘being White in Detroit,’ and being crystal clear on the privilege and often just plain foolishness that often entails, as folks try to become – or avoid – being part of the community that has been there all along. Most of all, it is falling in love with a house – and a city, what that love means. I believe this is going to be a very big book.Detroitists, urbanists – get it. Detroit Hustle.”

– Marsha Battle Philpot, Detroitst & Kresge Literary Arts Fellow

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“With humor and incisiveness, Haimerl shares the journey of turning a house into a home, lovingly called ‘Matilda.’…This book is about more than the blight of Detroit; it is also about making a new home and community in a rapidly changing city.”

“Detroit Hustle is much more than a book about the restoration of house. It’s about a city and its people abandoned to the churn of change, about fitting in and standing out, about decades of decay and wispy hopes of revival. It’s America’s story. Amy Haimerl’s memoir is as gritty and gripping as Detroit itself.”

“Haimerl does not ignore how her place in the middle class made homeownership possible for her, nor does she forget the problematic nature of Detroit’s recovery. At the same time, she also concludes that the “key to the city’s future” is investment by people and banks willing to believe in Detroit’s value as a place to call home. An engaging and cautiously optimistic memoir of making a new life.”

“Detroit Hustle is at once a cautionary tale charmingly told, a love-letter to Haimerl’s adopted city, an on-the-ground account of the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history, the confession of a reluctant gentrifier, and a meditation on the making of home. Haimerl doesn’t find ‘the next Brooklyn’ when she leaves New York for Detroit.
She seeks, and by the end of this memoir—after much looking, listening, and learning—has begun to find, Detroit.